sfsteps_024_el.JPG Tile setter Xiaohua Ouyong working with the complicated design. The 16th Avenue Steps have been given a mosaic makeover, thanks to the efforts of Jessie Audette and Alice Xavier, neighorhood advocates who raised $80,000 to get the risers covered in a mosaic sea-to-sky scene. Two SF artists created the design and made hand-made tiles for the 163 risers. The tile setters have installed the risers, so you'll be able to see the scene. They are still adding the grout and caulking.
Alice Xavier, who lives next door to the steps, will meet the photographer there to unlock the construction gates that now protect the steps from public use and public view.Event on 8/9/05 in San Francisco Eric Luse / The Chronicle less

sfsteps_024_el.JPG Tile setter Xiaohua Ouyong working with the complicated design. The 16th Avenue Steps have been given a mosaic makeover, thanks to the efforts of Jessie Audette and Alice Xavier, neighorhood ... more

Photo: Eric Luse

Image 2 of 3

sfsteps_126_el.JPG
Tile setters carefully work up the steps they are working on.
The 16th Avenue Steps have been given a mosaic makeover, thanks to the efforts of Jessie Audette and Alice Xavier, neighorhood advocates who raised $80,000 to get the risers covered in a mosaic sea-to-sky scene. Two SF artists created the design and made hand-made tiles for the 163 risers. The tile setters have installed the risers, so you'll be able to see the scene. They are still adding the grout and caulking.
Alice Xavier, who lives next door to the steps, will meet the photographer there to unlock the construction gates that now protect the steps from public use and public view.Event on 8/9/05 in San Francisco Eric Luse / The Chronicle less

sfsteps_126_el.JPG
Tile setters carefully work up the steps they are working on.
The 16th Avenue Steps have been given a mosaic makeover, thanks to the efforts of Jessie Audette and Alice Xavier, neighorhood ... more

Photo: Eric Luse

Image 3 of 3

SUNSET DISTRICT / Steps ready to reopen / Community helped raise $80,000 for mosaic work on 16th Avenue stairway

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A mosaic stairway depicting a sea-to-sky scene has been climbing, one colorful step at a time, up a steep hillside in Golden Gate Heights in recent weeks.

"I find myself driving by there a couple times a week just to look at the steps," said Robert Weinberg, a mortgage broker who lives nearby. "It's incredible. It's so much better than we ever imagined."

On Saturday, when the neighborhood celebrates the grand re-opening of the 16th Avenue Steps, Weinberg will finally be able to ascend its 163 stairs, pausing to admire the artwork along the way.

He'll stop at step No. 93 to admire a handmade tile -- a white calla lily -- inscribed with his name and that of his wife, Rita Hovakimian, in recognition of their $300 donation to the 16th Avenue Tiled Steps Project.

The couple are among the 250 individuals and businesses who bought handmade tiles -- fish, flowers, squirrels, crabs, sea shells, frogs, birds, dragonflies -- to help fund the $80,000 project.

The hand-carved flora and fauna are interspersed throughout the mosaic scene, amid ceramic, glass and mirror tiles.

It is the only public stairway in the city -- out of more than 350 -- to be decorated in tiles.

The mosaic stairway, created on 7-foot-wide panels that were attached to the risers of the stairway, was designed by Aileen Barr and Collette Crutcher. It was the first collaboration for the San Francisco artists.

The top of each step is covered in non-skid terra cotta tiles whose overhanging "nose" will help protect the mosaic panel below.

Crutcher said the colors of the tiles, which were donated by three Bay Area companies, are vivid.

"They're glazed, so they have kind of a glow or a sheen," she said. "There are times when you can see the city reflected in the mirrors in the moon and river."

Crutcher said it's unusual to have a mosaic scene on a stairway.

"You experience it in a different way than on a wall," she said. "If you stand at the bottom of the stairway, you can barely see the top. As you walk up, it's like watching a movie, because the scene progresses. There is no one vantage point where you can see it all."

"One woman bought a big fish tile for her family and the artists added little fish swimming around it to represent her family," she said.

Larragueta, who has lived in the neighborhood for 40 years, said the mosaic stairway has a magical effect on viewers.

"It brings out something in you when you see it," she said. "You just look at it and feel good."

It was the memory of a wondrous stairway in Rio de Janeiro that inspired Jessie Audette to launch the project to decorate the 16th Avenue Steps in early 2003.

Audette, who lived in Rio for five years while working for a wind energy company, loved walking up the stairway -- cloaked in whole tiles, shattered tiles, mirror fragments, crystals and fragments of porcelain -- that led to the picturesque neighborhood of Santa Teresa.

She remembered walking up the 16th Avenue Steps with her Brazilian husband and saying: "Remember those steps we used to walk up in Rio? Wouldn't it be neat if neighbors could get together and decorate these steps?"

Audette found a dedicated ally in Alice Yee Xavier, who has lived next door to the steps for more than a decade.

To get people excited about the project, they organized work parties -- at a retirement home, a church community hall and a hip cafe -- so individuals could help make the mosaic panels.

Rachel Miller-Garcia canvassed her block of 16th Avenue for donors, with her two young children -- Natalia and Lorenzo -- in tow. She said almost everyone the trio approached bought a tile, a success rate she attributed to her kids, saying with a laugh, "It helps when you drag your children along with you."

Unveiling

The 16th Avenue Steps will be unveiled Saturday. The free celebration from 10 a.m. to noon at 16th Avenue and Moraga Street will include lion dancing, live music and refreshments. Nearby streets will be blocked off. Public transit that serves the neighborhood: 28 19th Avenue bus, 66 Quintara bus, N-Judah train. www.tiledsteps.org.